Open Design ships without a model of its own and without a canvas of its own. The desktop app, from nexu-io/open-design, hands the design work to whatever coding agent already runs on your laptop, and every result lands as a real file: HTML, PDF, PPTX, or MP4, openable long after you close the app.
That inversion is the whole idea. Anthropic's Claude Design runs a closed loop: discover the brief, lock the direction, stream the artifact, critique, deliver. Open Design keeps the same loop but swaps the closed parts for a filesystem. Skills, design systems, and plugins become files that Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Gemini, Kimi, and roughly twenty other CLIs can read, write, and remix. The README puts it plainly: your CLI becomes the design engine, your laptop becomes the studio.
The app calls its outputs artifacts, and it lists four kinds. Prototypes are single-page HTML that render in a sandboxed iframe and download as source. HyperFrames are programmatic motion graphics rendered to a real MP4, with the README citing 1920x1080 at 30fps. Decks page through by keyboard and export to PPTX or PDF. Images generate at high resolution. There is no proprietary format in that list. A prototype is CSS, real fonts, and real components; a deck is a PPTX you can hand to someone who has never heard of Open Design.
The README pitches this as the Figma alternative for the agent era, and the distinction it draws is concrete: instead of pushing pixels on a canvas, you get single-page artifacts already shaped by your design system. That design system is a file too. Open Design distills a team's brand into a DESIGN.md and treats it as a brand contract that shapes every output across the Studio. Type a brief on the Home page, pick a skill and a design system, and the artifact streams out already carrying your fonts, spacing, and components.
Open Design ships as three things: skills, a CLI, and an MCP server. Once installed, od mcp install <agent>
wires the MCP server into a coding agent's config, and you call the same tools from inside that agent. The compatibility table lists Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code with Copilot, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Cline, Kimi, Kiro, Mistral Vibe, Hermes, and more, each a one-line install. The claim that keeps this maintainable: the adapter contract and stream parsers live in one file, apps/daemon/src/agents.ts
, and adding a new CLI is a single entry.
If you have no CLI installed at all, there is still a path. A BYOK proxy exposes POST /api/proxy/{anthropic,openai,azure,google,ollama,senseaudio}/stream
and runs the same loop without spawning a process. You paste a base URL, an API key, and a model, with presets for OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The README flags one security detail worth repeating: per-target SSRF protection blocks internal IPs, link-local, and CGNAT ranges at the daemon edge, which matters the moment you let users point a proxy at arbitrary URLs.
For a project sitting near 78k stars, the README sells hard. It leads with a 0.13.0 release, called Stay in Flow, that resumes runs across turns, adds a faster model picker, and hands off screenshot-backed PPTX and PDF. It leads again with Open Design Cloud, a paid first-party model service billed by token usage. What it does not include is any benchmark, any output-quality comparison, or any measure of how close the generated artifacts land to a designer's intent. So the pitch is architectural, not empirical. The value on offer is the absence of lock-in: no commitment to a single model, a single agent, or a single file format, all running local-first on macOS and Windows under Apache-2.0. Whether the artifacts themselves are any good is a question the README leaves to you. Given that everything runs on your own machine and exports to formats you already open every day, that is at least a test you can run yourself before you trust it with a client deck.
GitHub: https://github.com/nexu-io/open-design Curated by Agent Palisade — practical AI for small and mid-sized businesses.